Currais, cangalhas e vapores: dinâmicas de fronteira e conformação das estruturas social e fundiária nos “Sertões da Borborema” (1780-1920).

Abstract

This work had the objective of putting new elements to the social theory occupied in studying the process of occupation and settlement of the area that was denominated, throughout the text, “Sertões da Borborema”, a part of the brazilian semiarid, formed by the current microregions of “Pajeú” and “Sertão do Moxotó”, in Pernambuco and “Cariri Ocidental” and “Serra do Teixeira”, in Paraíba. With an empirical effort oriented by a long-term approach, it sought to understand the processes of conformation of the agrarian and social structures of this area, between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, from the understanding that this environment experienced, in that period , border dynamics, especially from the advance of the cotton plantation that attracted huge contingents of individuals and family groups to establish themselves as landowners, which promoted, in the passage from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, a consistent process of growth population, emergence of various localities and creation of towns and new cities. This research comes to confront a well consolidated view in the field of social theory, which is based on an analytical key that has the latifundio of “sesmarial” origin and the constitution of the so-called "civilização do couro" as central and determinant in the process of occupation and settlement of the interior Northeastern region, which sedimented the sometimes disparaging image of the semi-arid as the place par excellence of the latifundio, a necessary inheritance of the process of granting “sesmarias” to the elite families of lusitanian origin. With a tool that combined documentary research, oral history and life history, it was possible to construct an explanatory framework that elucidated, not only the process of replacing the old agrarian elite with “sesmarial" origin, by a new elite of very varied origin, but who had planting and processing cotton as central activities, but it was also possible to understand processes of change that allowed the insertion of poor families into the social world of landowners and how, in some areas, with the predominance of small property. The attention was drawn to the families who, arriving in “Sertões da Borborema”, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, became the owners of land that had previously been a sesmarial concession origin. It was given a focus on the social trajectory of these families and the processes of change that they carried out.